The Paxton Pundit - by Stacey Youdin

The Baby Who?
"Okay, look, I can see where you could say that the
President could have been more precise in that language, but the
President was being truthful."
Dana Perino - 12/6/07

Mitt Romney delivered a speech, Thursday, respecting an establishment of religion.

It was such a busy week, beginning as it did with us left to guess whether malevolence, ignorance, incompetence or what-all was ticking in Dubbya's brain as he pumped up 'the Iranians are coming, the Iranians are coming,' and wrapping up with news that the CIA destroyed evidence which could have answered the 64 dollar question: whether we torture.

Although Harriet Myers had, along with a contingent of Congresspersons in the loop, asked the CIA not to do this thing, it is claimed that Dubbya only just now found out about it.

The week began with Keith Olbermann (there should be a drinking game with his neck vein, but that's another matter) delivering one of his trademark rants about an NIE already in circulation as Dubbya invoked the specter of WWIII. Had he waited until Friday, he could have had a two-fer.

It may be the stuff of the writers who are currently withholding their services to come to the conclusion that Dick Cheney keeps Dubbya on a short leash and on a need-to-know basis. Though it's not the be-all and end-all of verisimilitude, this notion does readily pass the 'duck test.'

Watching the re-airing of the Perino fiasco in its entirety is one of the joys of getting C-SPAN or browsing the Internet. She was the one who said the president would never send his press secretary out to do his nasty, dirty, naughty business, right?

The press corps played Ricky Ricardo and poor Ms. Perrino, when all was said and done, was left with about as much 'esplainin' to do as when it started. This is the ship of state losing its plates right in front of our eyes. One can only imagine what's going on beneath the water line.

The president has been caught ginning up intelligence, his own and/or the national security kind.

He was briefed in early August but didn't learn the details until last week. Wha-a-a-at?!

Q Let me ask you this: Did anyone from the intelligence community or Mike McConnell, himself, after listening to the President the other day, ask you or anyone in the White House to clarify what the President was told?
MS. PERINO: Absolutely not. No, absolutely not.

Exchanges like this are bound to come again as a result of Friday's news about destroyed tapes, lies to Congress, lies to the 9-11 commission and the courts, but not until the president will have had time to concoct an explanation of what he didn't know and when and how he arranged not to know it.

Sadly, if you go by the news outlets who cater to what is said we want to hear, this is all inside baseball.

The clip with Ms. Perino scolding Ed Henry for using the term "tipped the president off" is as close to in depth coverage of the issue as the marketplace evidently allows. Then, back to Illinois, Omaha, Aruba or wherever the ambulance chasing is at its most feverish.

On Thursday, Romney scored a coup of sorts when the over-air networks cut into programming for his speech from the Bush Library.

Two minor points from the get-go. Learn to use the teleprompter paddles. He looked as if he were watching a ping-pong match from the umpire's position. Secondly, if you try to use "the greatest generation" as context now that it's your generation's turn ("It's now my generation's turn. How we respond to today's challenges will define our generation.") you must remember that theirs made its mark as teen-agers. Your generation is caricature. For boomers, not unlike Bush, resorting to lying about your legacy is about all that's left.

Still, minor quibbles, those, for Romney went on to insult the founding fathers for political advantage.

"In John Adams' words: 'We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. ... Our Constitution,' he said, 'was made for a moral and religious people.' Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone."

In print, you can tell where the Adams quote ends. Not so, the broadcast version. But as Barry Lynn in a press release from Americans United for Separation of Church and State was quoted as saying, “I think it is telling that Romney quoted John Adams instead of Thomas Jefferson or James Madison. Jefferson and Madison are the towering figures who gave us religious liberty and church-state separation."

I needed the reminder that there was a lot of back and forth to that framing business. We tend to think of the finished product as (poof) appearing. Actually there was intent when the founding fathers went beyond the standard of "does it establish a state religion?" which is the subterfuge of the Bush newspeak. Because they aren't establishing a religion, the Bushies (with about as much brain power as one could expect from Alberto Gonzales and John Ashcroft before him) feel quite comfortable having an office of faith-based initiatives in all the departments.

There were six states which, at the time of the constitutional convention, had state laws which, while not giving explicit advantage to one particular sect, respected the establishment of religion, or in other words intertwined citizenship and religiosity to the point where there were two politics: the one with the voting and the representatives and then the one with the internecine struggles among the holier than thou.

In the parlance of Mitt Romney's 2007, the Constitution forbade Congress from passing laws which even smell of "freedom requiring religion."

It's been beaten to death, the implications of Romney's speech to an atheist, agnostic, or non-organized theist, but the overlooked ramifications were those to a citizen.

Why did he feel the need for the speech in the first place? Perhaps the subtitle might aptly have been in America we don't do this kind of thing but, if we did, this is why I'm on the winning side.

It made me ill. Had not Kennedy put all this to rest?

Evidently, the lesson Romney took from JFK's speech was that he had bargained his way into adjectival commonality with the evangelicals who were lining up to PT boat him, seeking his rightful place to one side of the hyphen in our great Judeo-Christian heritage.

But, as any Jew will tell you, they haul out that Judeo strictly for advantage. They don't know anything about Judaism, really, those evangelicals.

So Romney wasn't trying to enlighten us to the point of welcoming Mormo-Judeo-Christian into the lexicon (perhaps the straw that would break the evangelical's back). He was trying to borrow from Kennedy's reassurances where none were needed.

This is the age of Oprah, the blog, and the semi-aware. Romney was afraid that "Christian Leader" made too good a caption in a Huckabee commercial and assembled a reaction so carelessly that it endorsed anathema (from a citizen's point of view).

He has now invited a test of Mormonism vs. Christianity because if his religion is seen as bogus by his recently injected standards, abstract nouns which help you win elections would not be his province.

He could go to 21 flags. Still, nothing.

At the one level where he would answer to no church or hierarchy therein, he is repeating Kennedy and perhaps getting into Lloyd Bentsen territory for even bringing it up in the 21st century. But by swearing personal allegiance to Jesus, though a perfunctory examination of the differences in religious doctrines leads many to assign Mormonism cult status, he was saying he wanted to be included in the internecine struggles which have no business paralleling the people's business.

He could have stayed out of these dark waters. After a few well written comparisons were common knowledge, the chips would have fallen where they might, but only among those for whom the establishment of religion is paramount.

For the rest of us, before you knew it, his record as a cutthroat investment schemer would have seemed more important.

This, boys and girls, is why you don't commingle these things. Even just a smidgen.

Nobody at the mall is going "the baby who?" True.

That, however, is culture.

Anybody who tries to translate it into political advantage is not the Constitution's friend, let alone potential defender. But the self-evident must wait. We've got elections coming.

The coming weeks are a kind of countdown, and not just in shopping days.

Can 1.21 jiggawatts of truth propel the De Lorean of state back to recreate those tapes of the torture we don't commit, because those tapes no longer exist?

Next week: Corn Fed

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